


Loose Ends

by pocketmouse



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode: s05e13 The Big Bang, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-10
Updated: 2011-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:24:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketmouse/pseuds/pocketmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home in Leadworth after their honeymoon, Rory has an encounter with River.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to settiai for looking this over for me.

"Oi, Rory!" It's Katy, one of the other nurses on the floor. "Front desk. You've got a visitor." She grins at him, almost leering, and taps her hip meaningfully. "Gonna get you in big trouble one of these days."  


Rory reaches down to his own hip, and curses. No pager — again. Since coming back from their 'honeymoon,' he's forgotten it more often than he's remembered it. His phone, too. That's been worse — the days he remembers it are usually the days it dies after not being charged for a week. Fortunately, Amy is amused by the whole thing, and still has the kind of job where she can run it down to him if she notices his pager sitting on the counter or hears his phone beeping plaintively from where it's fallen behind the dresser.  


He jogs down the hall to the front desk, but it's not Amy standing there waiting for him, one hip resting casually against the desk, pager clipped to her belt.  


It's River.  


He skids to a stop. "Uh — hello?"  


She smiles back at him, and tosses him the pager. "Hello, Rory."  


He squints at her. "If you're looking for Amy, she's not here, and the Doctor —" Well, the Doctor isn't either. He's somewhere else, without the two of them. Off somewhere where he doesn't have to deal with three-way relationships.  


River smiles at him again, and there's such sympathy in her face that for a moment he wonders if she knows what he was thinking, and has to fight down the blush spreading across his face. "I know where the Doctor is right now. But it was you I was looking for." She raises one wrist, which has a familiar leather band strapped to it. "I've got an errand I need to run, and I was wondering if you'd like to come with me?"  


"Go where?" He doesn't trust any errand that requires time travel. He's not stupid.  


"You'll see when we get there," she says, and turns her hand out, palm open, waiting for him.  


OK, maybe he's a little stupid. "Just make it quick, yeah? I'm not even technically on break."  


"They won't even know you were gone," she promises, and the hospital walls disappear in a flash of light.  


  


The cave they materialize in is more familiar to Rory than his own bedroom. The torches already lit, he stares up at the Pandorica in horror.  


"No. No — it can't be. It can't be real. This is a trick." He tries to pull away, but River's hand is around his wrist and her grip is like iron. He turns to face her, sick with anger. "What the hell is it doing here? When did you take me to?" He turns to the doors, sealed shut with layers of cobwebs. Amy —  


"The Doctor's a brilliant man," River says, seeming unconcerned. "But he's not one for details other than the ones he chooses. He used the Pandorica to transport information from the old universe into the heart of the TARDIS, but he forgot that the Pandorica itself is part of that original universe." She strokes the back of his hand with her thumb. "And while all the monsters might have crawled back to the shadows to keep plotting, the Pandorica is still here, only this time it's empty and there's no one to guard it."  


He looks at it again. It looks the same as it always had. Foreboding. Mysterious. He looks back at her. "But it doesn't need a guard."  


She gives him a look, her eyes sparkling in the flickering torchlight. "Rory. Two thousand years of human exploration, poking their noses into advanced scientific machinery, and you think it should be left unguarded?"  


He thinks of Carter and Magellan and Gaskell, and concedes that she's probably right. "What are you going to do?"  


"Frankly, it's too dangerous to be here at all. It's an intergalactic trouble beacon, human curiosity aside. The Romans and the Celts out there won't know what to do with themselves, or anyone who comes looking for it. I thought you might like to help me destroy it."  


"It's an inescapable prison, you can't just blow it up." _Besides, we're under Stonehenge_.  


"Only from the inside, remember?" She moves away from him, apparently satisfied that he's done freaking out. "And no, I'm not going to blow it up, you're right. Don't want to attract too much attention." River pulls out a large toolbox from behind the Pandorica. It contains several blasters, a laser cutter, and other tools he doesn't even recognize. She hands him the cutter. "Still, I thought you'd like to help."  


He turns the cutter over in his hands. "You know, I think you're right."  


  


The work isn't hard, not with his laser saw and River's disintegrator to get the tricky bits, but it's still metal they're cutting up, and he's quickly grown sure that he'll need to stop off at home and change clothes before going back to the hospital. But it feels good, right, to be here, putting the Pandorica to rest. Another internal light darkens as its power supply is cut. He removes it and sets it aside.  


"So how long's it been for you since you've seen us last?" he asks, to fill the air with something other than heat and the sound of metal.  


"Oh, about two weeks?"  


"Really, that's funny, because that's how long we were —"  


"Gone real time?" She winks at him and hauls a plate half her size over her head. "I know. I've been running around Earth for those two weeks, real time, trying to tie up all these loose ends."  


He stops for a moment. "Was there really that much?" He can't remember. Really, he can't wrap his head around everything that happened.  


"Well, I may have made a few personal stops along the way as well. Two thousand years, though, that's a lot of history to check up on."  


He nods. He's well aware.  


River doesn't look at him, just keeps working, ripping apart circuitry. "There's ways of forgetting, you know. Perfectly medically safe, too. But you don't want to forget, do you?"  


He stares at his hands. "When I was little, and Amy wanted to do something dangerous but I said no, she'd call me a scaredy-cat. My dad always called me sensible." He huffed a little laugh, and squeezed his hand into a fist then open again, hearing his knuckles crack. "For a long time, I thought Amy was the one of them that was right. It took me a long time to decide who I was. I don't want to forget any part of myself, especially something so difficult as that."  


River looks at him, her eyes as serious and solemn as the Doctor's. "That was a plastic copy, Rory, it wasn't you."  


"I remember," he says, insistent. His heart is beating fast. "I remember it, and that makes it me. Two thousand years, I think I know who I am."  


She smiles, a twitch of her lips that starts in one corner and spreads across her face. "So mature. What a refreshing change of pace."  


Rory lifts the last chunk of ceiling out of the way, sending it to the ground with a satisfactory crash. "He's nine hundred years old. He's got to be mature sometimes, right?"  


"You'd be surprised," River says dryly. She vaporizes a corner joist with extreme relish.  


A heavy sigh makes its way past his lips before he even realizes the emotion sitting in his chest is regret.  


River laughs. "Oh, now, don't be that way. He'll come back, you'll see. I may not have met you before last week, but believe me, I've heard stories."  


"River, he practically promised to call us later and dumped us on the kerb. It took me a week to convince Amy he really was going to see us again, and another two days after that before I was sure she wasn't going to knock his teeth in the next time she did."  


"The Doctor has nine hundred years of emotional repression — it takes him a while to get over himself." A section of wall goes tumbling over as River kicks it. "But he will. The two of you, you're good for him."  


Rory eyes her narrowly. "That's not a spoiler?" He remembers what Amy had told him about the woman.  


She shrugs. "It's the same advice I'd give most people who love the Doctor." Love. There it is.  


"I —" There are so many things he could say, questions he could ask her. How she can stand to love a man who leapfrogs around time and space, who has the maturity of a three year old. How she can patiently share him with so many others. Why she would clean up after him like this. When he might come back. But he knows better than to ask, to add to her burden. Besides, he's pretty sure he knows the answers already.  


"Tell me a story, then. Something that's already happened. Something ridiculous, for the next time he gets all high and mighty."  


And she does. With a knowing look in her eye, but she tells him a story of another Doctor and a cloister full of cat-nuns and a priceless painting. His sides are aching with laughter by the time she's done, and the giant metal prison is dismantled piece by piece.


End file.
